What I'm playing this weekend: Eliminate for iPhone

It's kill-or-be-killed, Quake-style multiplayer action on the iPhone, complete with about a half-dozen maps, an arsenal of weapons and armor, above-average graphics and sound—and for the most part, it's free, give or take the odd microtransaction.

Out now for the iPhone and iPod Touch, Eliminate is an interesting experiment for the developers at ngmoco (the crew behind Rolando, Dropship, and Topple). In essence, they're giving away a high-quality iPhone game in the hopes of making money from players looking to upgrade their characters with new and better weapons, armor, and skins.

The advantages for gamers like us are two-fold. Number one, we can play for free as long and as often as we want (although you'll have to purchase "energy" to earn experience and credits for more powerful weapons and armor). Advantage number two: Since the game is free to download, more players are playing the game, meaning (for now, at least) there are thousands of online Eliminate players to compete against at any given moment.

OK, enough about the business model; on to the game.

Eliminate has a threadbare plot (which is fine by me, frankly): You're a "weapons test combatant" in the employ of "Arsenal Megacorp," one of those massive, sinister corporations familiar to anyone who's played "Resident Evil" before.

Your job: Test the company's latest, greatest weapons on your fellow "test combatants" in the Arsenal arena. Your ever move is tracked by Arsenal, and the better you perform, the more experience points and credits you earn, and you can cash in those credits to buy new weapons (ranging from standard assault rifles to "vaporizors" and rocket launchers), upgrade your armor (some suits add vertical jets that let you leap high into the air, others have embedded cloaking devices or high-capacity shields), or don decorative "skins."

The gameplay itself is a blast. As with other FPS iPhone games I've played, you "move" by nudging a small circle on the left side of the screen with one thumb, and "look" with a second "thumb" circle on the other side of the display; tap to fire, or you can enable an "auto-fire" option that shoots whenever an enemy is in your crosshairs.

The maps themselves aren't all that much to look at—just your typical, futuristic looking corridors, stairways, and moving platforms—and the players skins aren't intricately detailed, either.

But in a multiplayer FPS like Eliminate, gameplay is everything: if you aim and fire at an opponent and your bullets don't hit their target due to a laggy connection or sluggish game performance, you're not gonna have fun. That said, I'm happy to report that Eliminate plays great, especially over Wi-Fi; rarely did I ever see other players up and disappear because of a laggy server, for example. (You can also play Eliminate over 3G, but I can't really test 3G performance here in my Brooklyn apartment due to the pathetic AT&T signal on my block.)

I was also pleased to see so many other Eliminate players online: more than 5,000 during peak hours, with several hundred matches going on at any given time. In my tests, it took no more than about 5-10 seconds to join a new multiplayer match.

OK ... but where does the money come in? Here's how it works: You can play Eliminate free for as long as you want, but your "energy" meter must be charged to earn credit and experience points. A fully charged energy meter will run dry after about four matches or so; after that, you'll need to either wait a day for your meter to re-charge on its own, or you can buy "power cells" via iTunes to re-charge instantly. You need 12 cells to replenish your meter, and a 20-pack of cells costs 99 cents.

Frankly, I think that's pretty reasonable, and those who play just a few matches a day can expect to blast away and earn credits/experience without paying a nickel.

So ... that's what I'm up to this weekend, gaming-wise at least. Next week, I'm looking forward—like everyone else—to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and I'm expecting Tekken 2 to appear in my mailbox any day now.

What are you playing this weekend?